BOYCOTT RATING

Not all companies on the boycott list are the same in their level support for Israel - some are far worse than others. The idea of introducing the "Boycott Rating" is to give at a quick glace some indication of which companies are the worst.

Its a feature that has been requested for a long time, but one which we hesitated to implement. By its very nature its not an exact science - often we are comparing apples to oranges. Its certainly no substitute for reading the research on the companies, but never the less we felt it was a useful indicator and have now implemented it.

In calculating the rating we have taken in to account the following factors:

Economic support: Is the company Israeli? Does it invest in Israel? Is it a major investor - and hence a winner of the Jubilee Award? Does it invest in the "Occupied Territories"?

Political Support: Does the company or its owners give political support to Israel? If so, what level of support?

Links to Military: Does the company or owners have links to the Israeli Military? How strong are these links?

Apart from these core factors, occasionally other special factors have also had an influence on the ratings.

Soon we will be publishing the ratings for all the companies. In the meantime, a couple of examples to illustrate what a rating score indicates:

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A non-israeli company which invests in Israel will score a rating of 1.

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A non-israeli company invests in Israel and has received a Jubilee Award from Israel (an indication of the size of the investment and its importance to Israel). The company has also been caught investing in the Occupied Territories (in the illegal settlements). It will score a rating of 4.

"You cannot simplify the question of violence.. You look at human history - the American revolution, the civil war, the end of slavery in the United States, the African National Congress, the end of colonialism - by and large these were some combination of popular social uprisings and social movements and non-violent protests AND armed resistance. Now that doesn't mean I'm advocating for any armed action today, I'm not. I'm committed to finding ways of acting and speaking and making people laugh and doing art and disrupting the war machine in other ways, but I think focusing on violence when we have the comfort of being protected by mass of armed violence is not non-violence at all.. if you are pointing to the mass of violence and who's doing the mass of violence in the world today, you have to look to state violence - that's people bombing whole cities from the air.. "